![]() “The space mission software had to be man-rated. Photo credit: NASAīut Hamilton was tougher on herself than any bureaucrat could be. Hamilton said, “I have no answer to that.”) Margaret Hamilton in an Apollo Command Module. “We evolved our ‘software engineering’ rules with each new relevant discovery,” said Hamilton, “while top management rules from NASA went from complete freedom to bureaucratic overkill.” (She was once asked how researchers could overcome such suffocating bureaucracy. Want more tech news? Subscribe to ComputingEdge Newsletter Today! They were free to develop their software programs unimpeded. In the beginning, NASA gave Hamilton and her team carte blanche. “Systems simulations were a mix of hardware and digital simulations of every-and all aspects of-an Apollo mission which included man-in-the-loop simulations, making sure that a complete mission from start to finish would behave exactly as expected,” Hamilton said. While software was not an important part of the Apollo program in the beginning, it became clear by 1965-when Hamilton came on board-that software was going to be integral in putting a man on the moon. Knowledge, or lack thereof, was passed down from person to person.” “There was no field for software engineering,” said Hamilton, “You were on your own. She wanted it to be respected as any other realm of engineering. In the early days, according to Hamilton, no one really knew what they were doing. See full calendar of IEEE Computer Society conferences Margaret Hamilton at MIT during the Apollo 11 mission. Recently, Hamilton was a featured keynote speaker at the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering held in Gothenburg, Sweden, where on May 31 she delivered her address “The Language as a Software Engineer.” Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline,” she said in a recent interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. “I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it-and those building it-would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. Hamilton explains why she chose to call it software engineering: Indeed, Margaret Hamilton, renowned mathematician and computer science pioneer, is credited with having coined the term software engineering while developing the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft as head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Hamilton is CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. ![]() It might come as a surprise to most of today’s software engineers to learn that the founder of their discipline is a woman.
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